Powerful Win Win Solutions: A Practical Toolkit for Resolving Conflict in the Workplace

By Hoda Lacey

This book is for both managers and those they manage. It is for both individuals and teams. It is a practical book which, I hope, will speak to both your hearts and your minds.
Since this book was first published in 2000, I have received many encouraging comments from readers telling me what a difference it has made to their lives. The book has been purchased by libraries, prisons, social services, universities and students. It has been recommended as essential reading material by various training organizations and educational establishments. It has also been translated into three languages.
But the book was a hardback edition retailing at a high price. This meant that it was out of the reach of many of the people for whom I originally wrote the book. I hope that by having it republished in paperback at a more affordable price range, more people will be able to purchase it and put the skills into practice.
I know this book works. It is based on material from the excellent 12 Skills Programme from the Conflict Resolution Network of Australia (CRN). (www.crnhq.org).
While grappling with my own conflict issues, fate brought me into contact with the teachings of the CRN, a network of people with a common commitment to conflict resolution, co-operative communication strategies and related skills.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781456797140

Hoda Lacey

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© 2012 by Hoda Lacey. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/27/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9715-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9714-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Praise For Hoda Lacey’s Work

Foreword

Preface To Second Edition

Acknowledgements

PART ONE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

PART TWO

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

PART THREE

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Appendix I

Appendix Ii

DEDICATION

To Kareem, Hannah, Noor, and Malaka with love. I hope you grow up in a peaceful world.

PRAISE FOR HODA LACEY’S WORK

This is a great book. I am honoured to see how skilfully Hoda Lacey has developed concepts taught by the Conflict Resolution Network in Australia and woven in her own life experience and extensive research. Everyone who faces problems at work will find words of wisdom here. With these skills conflicts become opportunities to learn and grow.

Helena Cornelius, Author and Director, Conflict Resolution Network

With growing awareness of the devastation caused by both physical and psychological violence, Hoda Lacey’s timely book … . provides practical tools for both identifying conflict and proactively dealing with it.

Tim Field, author of Bully in Sight

Anyone who works with other people will find this book helpful. But it will be of special value to managers, supervisors, consultants and counsellors

Business Executive

Ms Lacey is particularly skilled at identifying fundamentals.

Modern Management

It is a book to work through rather than simply read … . to explore one’s organisation, own beliefs and reactions and to develop awareness.

Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development West London Branch Newsletter

This book will help managers to create a win-win situation for all involved in workplace conflicts … . will prove invaluable to most businesses—large or small. A happy workplace is a productive one.

w ww.Stenaline.com

Overall, this is a very readable and accessible workbook. It is suitable for any employee, manager or non-manager … .

The Leadership & Organization Development Journal

This book is not only a clear and simple textbook on the subject, but it is also an enjoyable and life-enhancing read. Its fascination lies in the fact that we can relate almost every page to our own selves and experiences.

Institute of Travel & Tourism Journal

A very timely work which will prove of special value to managers, supervisors, consultants and trainers. Highly Recommended.

Newsletter of the Anglo American Book Company and the Accelerated Learning Centre

… . providing emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills for anyone from managers and leaders to aspiring millionaires … . it is a positive goldmine of fantastic material and insight and is a must for anyone who comes into contact with other human beings. I wish I had written it myself.

Stephen Daltrey, CEO Millionaire Master Coach

FOREWORD

Foreword by Peter Cook

Conflict costs businesses and individuals billions every year. Not to mention the heartache that spreads around the world as a result of corrosive and continuing conflicts, be they domestic or global. Whether you are a parent trying to get your kids to bed on time, someone trying to make a customer complaint about your mobile phone, a business person trying to get paid on time, a mediator working with an employee and their boss, or someone working in the united nations, attempting to sort out world peace, Hoda Lacey’s book offers you a practical and detailed guide to the strategies and tactics you might employ to move from a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ through to resolution of conflict and long term co-operation.

Having worked with scientists, academics and musicians for much of my life, I have experienced a number of conflicts, mostly over ideas rather than the hand to hand variety, I’m pleased to say. Whilst conflict has value in encouraging innovation through the battle of ideas, all too often people confuse this with a battle over the personalities behind the ideas. This is when Hoda’s depth of skill and experience comes into play as a professional conflict handler.

Differing perceptions and expectations are often behind much conflict in daily life and hoda offers a variety of ways for recognizing and harmonizing these. Some conflicts are simple, but many become complex which makes them much harder to handle. One example was the time when I sponsored English eccentric cult punk rocker John Otway’s attempt to organize a record breaking rock’n’roll world tour in the spirit of ‘spinal tap’. The project failed not because it was a bad idea, but because it ran out of cash due to poor execution of the strategy. Having invested a considerable sum of my life savings in the enterprise and put my heart and soul into the project, I found lawyers simply made the debt recovery problem more complex at greater cost. Had I known Hoda at the time, I should have engaged her to unpack the complexity and get to the heart of the dispute. It is situations like this that demand the use of a professional conflict handler.

Hoda’s book offers a compendium of approaches to the resolution of conflict. It is well-researched, in so far as it stands on the shoulders of giants such as Charles Handy, Edward de Bono, Daniel Goleman and Anthony Robbins. She also uses personal examples that will help you set your own situation alongside ones that are similar. Storytelling and narratives can be more powerful than a spreadsheet in helping people to see connections between events and in moving from the present into the future. I also like the fact that Hoda acknowledges power as a feature of conflict and encourages us to work with it, rather than holding the assumption that we all belong to the ‘flat earth society’—a land where all have the same amounts and types of power. I have worked with huge power differentials in my time, sometimes achieving David and Goliath type results in conflict situations where it simply should not be possible to reach any sense of equity. Hoda provides insights into how you may level the playing field in such circumstances.

Peter cook

MD human dynamics and the academy of rock Author ‘best practice creativity’, ‘Sex, leadership and rock’n’roll’ and ‘Punk rock people management’

November 2011

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.

Indira Gandhi

Why have I written this book?

This book is for both managers and those they manage. It is for both individuals and teams. It is for trainers, coaches, mentors and organisational consultants. It is a practical book which, I hope, will speak to both your hearts and your minds.

Since this book was first published in 2000, with the title How to Resolve Conflict in the Workplace, I have received many encouraging comments from readers telling me what a difference it has made to their lives. The book has been purchased by libraries, prisons, social services, universities and students. It has been recommended as essential reading material by various training organizations and educational establishments. It has also been translated into three languages.

But the book was a hardback edition retailing at a high price. This meant that it was out of the reach of many of the people for whom I originally wrote the book. I hope that by having it republished in paperback at a more affordable price, more people will be able to purchase it and put the skills into practice.

I know this book works. It is based on material from the excellent 12 Skills Programme from the Conflict Resolution Network of Australia (CRN). (www.crnhq.org).

While grappling with my own conflict issues, fate brought me into contact with the teachings of the CRN, a network of people with a common commitment to conflict resolution, co-operative communication strategies and related skills.

The CRN was founded by the United Nations of Australia in 1986. The material they created was Australia’s contribution to the United Nations Year of Peace

The material in the CRN course has been tried, tested and refined over 25 years. It is based on the book Everyone Can Win by Helena Cornelius and Shoshana Faire (Cornelius and Faire 2010) and the 12 Skills training manual which accompanies it.

One of the most generous gifts that that the CRN gave the world was free access to their materials which can be downloaded and used in training courses as long as the source is clearly acknowledged in writing.

While facilitating courses based on the CRN material, I observed first-hand the remarkable shifts in thinking that it produced. I witnessed dozens of ‘Aha’ moments. And I still meet people by chance today that were on one of the courses who tell me how much of a difference it made, and is still making, to their lives.

There are literally dozens of books on conflict on the market. So why would I want to write my own? I have been reading, researching and teaching this subject since 1992. I was also an agony aunt for a trade publication for 10 years. I am constantly being asked how to resolve one problem or another.

My particular field of interest is conflict in the workplace. My goal was to produce a practical, easy to read book for individuals at all levels. Directors and CEOs will gain as much as a junior recruit to the business. Although it is informative, it is not designed as a book on the theory of conflict nor an academic tome.

Resolving a conflict and solving a problem are two different matters. Problems may be resolved rationally. Conflict is emotional and messy. There is no logic to it. To reach a resolution, you need to adopt new mindsets and new approaches. This book works from the inside out. It encourages you to examine your own part in a conflict and to put aside pride, resentment, fear, anger and guilt. When you have dealt with your own baggage, the way forward will become obvious to you.

Conflict is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact of life. How we deal with it is what matters. Without conflicting opinions, there would be no impetus to change, no progress, no onward movement. We can express these opinions in a positive fashion or in a negative fashion. Resolving conflict is not avoiding or suppressing conflict. It is using the conflict and turning it round so that we derive benefit from it. It allows us to grasp the opportunity to move on.

Managing conflict in the workplace is an essential skill. The chances are that if you manage staff, not only will you come into conflict with some of them some of the time, but you will also be called upon to resolve conflicts between them at some point. That is why identifying and minimizing interpersonal conflict is recognized by the Management Charter Initiative as one of its National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) Occupational standards for Managers.

There is a more open admission of conflict in the workplace these days. My work as a management development consultant brings me face to face with conflict on a regular basis. I see its effect on morale, on team behaviour, on motivation, on productivity and, ultimately, on profit.

Daniel Dana, of the Mediation Training Institute International believes that unmanaged employee conflict is the largest reducible cost in organizations today and probably the least recognized.

Since this book was first published in 2000, the use of industrial tribunals has increased substantially. In fact, it is estimated that there was a 50% jump between 2009 and 2010 alone!

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) estimate that poorly managed conflict in the UK costs £24 billion per annum. According to CEDR 2006 (www.cedr.com), the cost is even higher at £33 billion a year every year. People don’t leave poor jobs, they leave poor managers. 50% of employees caught in a conflict situation at work will leave their jobs.

The cost of employee turnover is often under-estimated. In a recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Managers, respondents revealed that only 44% had a process in place to estimate turnover costs; 43% of companies relied on intuition, and 13% had no process at all. Considering the actual cost estimates of between 75% and 150% of annual salary, this is a significant figure.

Many managers tell me that if they did not have to spend so much time solving problems, they would have more time to do their job properly. In a recent survey respondents estimated that they spent between 10 and 20% of their week dealing with conflict. My own observations are that it may be even higher than that! Can you imagine how much lost time that represents? And what could you or your managers be accomplishing instead?

In the same survey, 53% reported that they were reactive rather than pro-active in dealing with conflict and over a third of respondents said that managers do not have the necessary skills to deal with it.

Managers tell me that disciplinaries cause them as much stress and worry as they do to the employees involved. It is estimated that 40% of grievances are related to relationship issues between colleagues. Surely the time spent on training managers to deal with the emotional fallout is just as important as learning the legal and HR procedures?

A common misapprehension is that dealing with conflict means sorting out disagreements between members of staff, or staff and customers. Actually, the time spent is often due to the secondary consequences of unresolved conflict. Stress, de-motivation, anxiety, or resentment are direct fallouts of conflict and they are the main contributors to lack of good customer service, productivity and performance.

I have seen good employees leave organizations because they could not handle the conflict. I have seen top management turn a blind eye, denying that such problems exist within their organization, until conflict blows up into a serious confrontation. They hope that by ignoring conflict for long enough it will resolve itself. Unfortunately, conflict does not simply disappear. It may go underground for a while but it will resurface with a vengeance when we are least expecting it.

You have probably used one or more of the tools of conflict resolution in the past. You may have known what to do intuitively and not realized that it is a skill that can be learned. You may assume that people should be adult enough to resolve their own problems, that many of the approaches are just ‘common sense’. But we are not taught social or interpersonal skills at school, nor are they part of basic ‘on the job training’.

This book offers you a toolkit of skills and some help in selecting the appropriate tool for the level of conflict with which you are involved. You may be skilled in one aspect but not another. The danger is that if you are skilled in using a hammer, then every problem will probably look like a nail! If an approach has worked in the past, we tend to make the problem adapt to our solution next time.

Underlying the philosophy of conflict resolution is taking responsibility for ourselves and a belief that ‘together we can work this out. If we were more able to adopt this mindset, and were prepared for open dialogue with our peers and bosses, there would be less need for official channels for grievances and disciplinaries and less time and money spent on industrial tribunals.

This necessitates a willingness to become more co-operative, to adopt a win/win outlook and to be the one to take the first step towards resolving a conflict—even if you think the other person is at fault! And this is where conflict resolution training comes in. We are often prepared to accept apologies or let bygones be bygones so long as someone else takes the first step! No one said resolving conflict is easy.

You may have heard the adage ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’. But this applies only if we assume that circumstances remain stable and static. In a changing world, we need to adapt our behavioural repertoire to give ourselves more choices.

In the past you may have been used to dealing with conflict in a certain way, and you were prepared for a particular outcome. Suddenly, you find that your old tactics are no longer working. You are doing the same thing, but you are not achieving the same results. Other people and circumstances have moved on. Employees may have become more aware of their rights; more empowered, less cowed by authority. This is a new world of business and you must learn a new set of skills to go with it.

This phenomenon was most poignantly seen after the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. The royal family followed tradition and behaved in the way it had always done. But it was dealing with a new public expectation here and neither they, not their advisers, were able to adjust quickly enough. Anger and resentment started to mount among the people, as new behaviors and new interactions were demanded. Luckily, the Palace responded just in time and the crisis was averted.

This episode may serve as a management lesson for all of us. You need to